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Speakers Attract Sooty Shearwaters

December 2012- Our surveillance camera has picked up activity at the hoped-for seabird colony only a month after the first speaker system went in. The above was sent to a cellphone back in Wellington showing a sooty shearwater landing?/exercising? at 1 AM on 3 December. The speaker is at top right.

These seabird-attracting systems are fast becoming standard practice and they are helping, unsupervised, to found colonies of burrow-nesting seabirds- the keystone species of any self-respecting seabird island- in many locations. Fauna Recovery NZ is now up to its 6th system, including one on Wakaterepapanui, next island up from Puangiangi. Sooties were certainly on Puangiangi late (1980s/1990s) into Ross Webber’s tenure and it’s reasonable to assume that they lasted longer than the smaller shearwaters, petrels and prions in the face of rat predation. Peter and I had a good look in May 2012 for any activity at the old burrow sites, and everything looked long-abandoned, with no tell-tale cleared areas around the burrows, or seabird smell. On that basis our conjecture is that the speakers might well have been responsible for these sooties coming in for a look around.